Donald Culross Peattie (1898 - 1964)

 

  Mr. Peattie is an interesting fellow and if you are the type of person who enjoys books about nature, and writing that is a bit philosophical and poetic, then you should give him a try. Rather than rely on me and suffer through whatever I am about to write, go directly to the Wikipedia entry, where you will find a list of his books and from it you can determine if you want to carry on. 

  
  He wrote a lot and was quite popular, so used copies of his books are easy to get and if you have access to Western University libraries, you will find about ten. I have sometimes written about university presses and one of them, Trinity University Press, has chosen to reprint nine of his works. Four are pictured above. This Trinity University Press, by the way, is in San Antonio, Texas. One of the books shown is, A Book of Hours, which has 24 essays, one for each hour. Another not shone, An Almanac for Moderns, has a short essay for every day of the year.  I have not read them, but I have a copy of A Natural History of North American Trees.

  The Trinity edition is a paperback consolidation of his two volume work:  A Natural History of Trees of Eastern and Central North America (1950) and A Natural History of Western Trees (1953). You will enjoy it if you like a sentence like this: ''Where the deer bound, where the trout rise, where your horse stops to slather a drink from icy water while the sun is warm on the back of your neck, where every breath you draw is exhilaration -- that is where the aspens grow."

   If you do bother now to look at the Wikipedia entry, you may be put off by the brief statement that suggests that Peattie may have written some sentences which could now be considered regressive, in terms of race. It does note, however, that they "were mercifully brief and hardly malicious." I think it highly likely that Peattie was a good man and as proof, here is what his son has to say in the Foreword to The Natural History of Trees:

"Before I leave you to scroll among these leafy pages, I should make some last observations about my father, Donald Culross Peattie, renowned naturalist and acclaimed writer. He worked as hard as any man I know; he was a devoted husband to his life's soul mate, and a caring and thoughtful parent to all his children. But the quality that stands out above all others was his serenity in the face of trouble and the chaos of an unruly planet. The trivia, the selfishness, and the vulgar noise that fills much of our world never shook him, fixed as he was on listening to "the roar of a mountain river, and a higher frailer sound above the churning water, the singing of a forest in the night wind."

Sources: 
  To get his 'new' books: Trinity University Press. 
   If you are interested in the natural history of the Great Lakes area, Peattie wrote: Flora of the Indiana Dunes, a Handbook of the Flowering Plants and Ferns of the Lake Michigan Coast of Indiana and of the Calumet District. There is a copy in the Western Libraries, probably because a former president of the university Sherwood Fox, was a naturalist as well as a classicist. Earlier I recommended reading Edwin Way Teale and he also wrote about the Indiana Dunes. Those subjects are covered here: Edwin Way Teale and here: Parks Along the Great Lakes.

The Bonus:

  Peattie and his wife spent a few years living in Europe and he also wrote a history of the village in which they lived: Vence: The Story of a Provincial Town, which was also reprinted as Vence-Immortal Village. (I am a careless reader and thought it was 'Venice'.) Western Libraries have a couple of copies. BUT, you can also read it online. I happened to stumble across an American Europhile blogger who now lives in Vence. He decided, for good non-profit reasons to make his copy available and you can read it here: Steve and Carole in Vence: Immortal Village.